Faculty Strings

Kirsten Yon

Violinist Kirsten Yon is currently in residence at the University of Houston where she is Associate Professor of Violin and Chair of the String Division. Past engagements include serving as Associate Professor of Violin at Texas Tech University, a position she held for eight years.

An acclaimed teacher, performer, and clinician, she received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Michigan and the Cleveland Institute of Music before pursuing her Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. During her degrees, Ms. Yon studied with Stephen Shipps, William Preucil, David Updegraff, and Kathleen Winkler. Additionally, Ms. Yon has worked with Raphael Fliegel, Christian Teal, and Vaclav Snitil. She attended the Meadowmount School for Strings for five summers, where she was the first recipient of the Catherine Tait Memorial Scholarship for Teaching and Outstanding Leadership. The winner of multiple competitions, Ms. Yon has received outstanding accolades for her performances as a concert soloist, chamber musician, and for her concerto appearances.

Ms. Yon has performed with numerous professional orchestras across the United States and South America, including the Ann Arbor Symphony, the New World Symphony, and the Houston Symphony Orchestra. Concertmaster positions include the Bayou City Chamber Orchestra, the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, the Caprock Pro Musica Sinfonietta, and Ballet Lubbock. In the arena of chamber music, Ms. Yon was a founding member of the Champlain Trio, the Archiano Ensemble, the Karlin Trio, and the Botticelli String Quartet. Her concert schedules have included sold-out solo and chamber music recitals throughout Texas, New York (Carnegie Hall, Weill Recital Hall), California, Minnesota, Michigan, New Mexico, Brazil, Honduras, Germany, France, and Norway. In May 2005 the Botticelli String Quartet and violist Korey Konkol premiered a work by composer Peter Fischer at the International Viola Congress, held in Reykjavik, Iceland. She has toured Brazil with the Botticelli String Quartet and pianist Cristina Capparelli Gerling, traveling to Curitiba, Florianopolis, and performing several concerti with the Orquestra de Câmara Theatro São Pedro in Porto Alegre (Brazil).

Since the beginning of her professional career, students from both her college and pre-college studios have won numerous solo competitions and awards. A frequent violin clinician, Ms. Yon has given masterclasses at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and the Universidade Federal do São João del Rey (Brazil) in addition to numerous schools across the United States and Honduras. Ms. Yon is also a repeated guest artist at the Nathan Schwartzman String Festival in Uberlandia, Brazil (2009-2012). Ms. Yon served as the president of the South Plains Suzuki Strings Foundation and is a strong advocate of string education. In her initial year at Texas Tech University, she was honored with a Texas Tech University Alumni Association New Faculty Award for her work at the School of Music. In September of 2010, she was elected to the Texas Tech Teaching Academy, a distinct honor within the university.

Dedicated to musical outreach at the community and international levels, Ms. Yon is a founder and faculty advisor of Cuerdas de Enlace (String Connection), a pedagogical outreach program with ties to Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Previously on the faculty at the Interlochen Center for the Arts and the Texas Tech University Orchestra Camp, Ms. Yon also taught at the International Music Academy in Pilsen, Czech Republic from 2009-2011. In the summer of 2012, she joined the internationally acclaimed faculty of both the Texas Music Festival and the Cambridge International String Academy (England).

Ms. Yon's debut recording will be released by Centaur Records in 2013, featuring the Ravel and Kodály duos with cellist Jeffrey Lastrapes.